


Tea for Two

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Minor Angst, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 19:52:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s as he is dumping the contents of the second mug down the sink that John realises he has never been lonelier than he is now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tea for Two

**Author's Note:**

> \- Third person POV [John]  
> \- As a heads up, Gladstone was adopted post-Reichenbach and just one day before this story takes place.  
> \- If I had to place this story on a timeline, it would have to be about 1 month after TRF.

His shoulder is aching fiercely when he wakes up. 

That itself isn’t unusual, so he reaches over the side of his bed to the table next to it, digging around in the top drawer for the bottle of paracetamol he keeps there for occasions such as this. Popping the cap and shaking two of the white pills out into his palm, he swallows them dry and tosses the bottle back in the draw before turning over to try and catch a few more hours of sleep. The sky outside the window is still dark, the street still silent for the most part. A glance at the alarm clock on the bedside table would tell him that it is still only four-thirty in the morning. He doesn’t have to be up for another three hours.

Sleep doesn’t come to him as it should, and John briefly considers popping one of the sleep pills his therapist prescribed him back before he had met Sherlock. Back when it was just himself, the tiny room at the military halfway house, and the ruined shoulder that made his hand shake and his leg weak (both psychological troubles that hours of counselling might have eventually cured him of). Now the pills sit in the table drawer not a foot away from him, calling him, taunting him and tempting him with the promise of sleep without nightmares - of bullets flying overhead, men dying beneath his hands, blood on the pavement and a horrible ringing in his ears. They promise him relief.

He chooses to get up, instead. Throwing back the covers, he picks up a shirt and a jumper from where he dropped them the night before, winces as his feet touch the cold hardwood floor and goes downstairs to brew a cup of tea. There’s no use trying to sleep when pharmaceutical drugs join the shouting and moaning that’s already present in his tired mind. Gladstone glances up from where he is sleeping in his dog bed by the unlit fireplace, gives John a brief once-over, then goes back to sleep. The dog appears no worse for wear after having gnawed on that old withered thumb the day before, but John keeps an eye on the pup - just in case.

Filling the kettle and letting it sit to boil, John flicks on the telly and is momentarily taken in by the early morning newscast. Another serial killer on the loose. Close-door murder suicides. A painting stolen from the Louvre in Paris. All things that Sherlock would have no doubt been involved in and solved by now. The thought draws up a bitter pang of hurt, not unexpected, and John turns the television back off as the kettle begins to whistle.

He drops a teabag in the pot and pours the water in, then lets it sit to steep as he digs up the sugar (how it ended up hiding behind a stack of books on the fireplace mantel is beyond his recollection). When it’s done, he sets about pouring first one mug, then another, adds two sugars to the first but leaves the second black. It’s as he’s turning around and raising his voice to call to Sherlock through the closed main bedroom door that he notices what he’s doing.

It’s as he is dumping the contents of the second mug down the sink that John realises he has never been lonelier than he is now. He takes his lone mug with him to the sitting room and perches in the chair that had unofficially become ‘his.’ Gladstone remains sleeping, and for that John is thankful. He takes a sip of his tea.

And he cries.


End file.
